The Australian government is calling its $85 million plan to filter online pornography a failure.
The filtering project was part of the governments $189 million NetAlert program launched in August 2007 to protect minors from online sexual predators and to block adult content.
It was projected that 2.5 million households would use the free porn blocking filters within 12 months but only 144,088 have been downloaded or ordered on CD-ROM since August of last year. The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy estimated 29,000 filters were being used, less than 2 percent of the set goal.
Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said,” The program has clearly failed, despite over $15 million being spent in advertising to support it. Labor has always said that PC filtering is not a stand-alone solution to protecting children from online dangers.”
“The Government has a comprehensive cyber-safety plan that includes the
implementation of mandatory ISP-based filtering to deliver a filtered feed to all homes, schools and public Internet points. Education for parents and teachers as well as children is a priority.”
Opposition communications spokesman, Bruce Billson said the government was too quick to criticize the NetAlert program .” NetAlert is a program which is relatively new, as is the minister in his role, and I’m sure he would like a little more than six months or so before the public decide if he has been a failure or not,” he said.
“Proper supervision should be front and centre of any efforts to protect children from inappropriate material on the Internet; supported by additional tools such as content filters, not some mandatory and ill-conceived ‘clean feed’ measure by a government that believes only it has the authority to decide what’s appropriate or inappropriate content for computer users,” Billson told the Sun-Herald.
